For decades, a semiofficial feline assembly outside Parliament was a major tourist attraction.
Coal, the last surviving member of a colony of cats that thrived for decades outside Canada’s Parliament and became popular with tourists, has died. He was believed to be 17.
A Facebook page devoted to Coal said he had had an aggressive form of cancer that had spread to his lungs and received a veterinarian-administered death on Tuesday.
Little is known about Coal’s early life. But Danny Taurozzi, Coal’s adoptive owner, said it appeared he had been left at the informal colony as a kitten. There, Coal joined as many as three dozen cats who lived in crude shelters vaguely resembling the neighboring Centre Block building of Parliament.
Mr. Taurozzi was among a small group of volunteers who cleaned and maintained the shelters, in untamed bush behind a wrought-iron fence, just steps from the speaker’s entrance to the House of Commons. When the cats were not sleeping, they would sometimes allow themselves to be petted, he said.
The colony, which was also frequented by raccoons looking for a free meal, gradually became almost as large an attraction as the rest of Parliament Hill, and a mandatory stop for busloads of tourists.
Mr. Taurozzi said that the Dalai Lama had been among the dignitaries who had paid a visit to the cats. Another visitor, he added, was Stephen Harper when he was Canada’s prime minister.
